Donald Fagen’s ‘Eminent Hipsters,’ and More

“Eminent Hipsters” isn’t a memoir, but rather two projects stuck together: a series of essays Fagen (best known as half of Steely Dan, a band rarely mentioned in the book) calls “a kind of art-o-biography — that is, how the stuff I read and heard when I was growing up affected (stretched, skewed, mangled) my little brain,” and a tour diary from a 2012 jaunt with the Dukes of September, in which he starred alongside Michael McDonald and Boz Scaggs.

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Fagen’s look back at the heroes of his early years — the musicians, D.J.s and science fiction writers who give the book its title — is a smart, spiky depiction of the “nail-biting paranoia” of ’50s suburbia, and the power that underground visionaries like the singing Boswell Sisters or the radio hosts Uncle Mort and Jean Shepherd held for “a first-tier nerd” who felt he had been “framed and sentenced to a long stretch at hard labor in ­Squaresville.”

The Dukes diary, though, comes off bitter and mean. It’s no surprise Fagen can get off a good one-liner — “Asking me to play golf would be like asking me to drive over to the town dump and separate all the wrongly placed bottles and cans from the regular garbage” — but his nonstop kvetching about subpar hotels and venues and his dismissal of some fans as “moldering, bloodless vampires” quickly turn this 70-page section into an ugly slog.

Davies got into the rock memoir game early. The Kinks frontman published “X-Ray,” his “unauthorized autobiography,” in 1994, long before his peers started telling their own tales of decadence and recovery. “Americana” is alternately a sequel and parallel companion piece to “X-Ray,” chronicling his later years and his lifelong relationship with the country and culture that inspired him.

When he formed the most quintessentially British of the British Invasion bands, Davies writes, he “was dizzy with the sheer spectacle and enormity of the American dream.” His connection to the United States grew complicated, though, after the Kinks were banned from performing here in 1965, for reasons he still hasn’t figured out. Finally, in 2004, “the whole American dream had turned into a nightmare” when he was shot during a robbery in his adopted hometown, New Orleans.

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Like some Kinks songs, “Americana” can be overstuffed with distracting detail (especially the passages about the band’s various record deals), but Davies is candid and honest about his personal and creative struggles. “Until the shooting I had been living in an alternative or parallel universe, where I saw everything in song or lyric form,” he writes. But “the immovable ‘You’ is always there, whether you like it or not.”

Ronstadt was the hub around which the Southern California rock community in the 1970s, perhaps the most hedonistic scene of them all, initially revolved; the first version of the Eagles formed as her backing band. Yet in her slim, warmhearted memoir, “Simple Dreams,” she claims — playing down the impression she gave in interviews at the time — that she is allergic to alcohol and that an experiment with cocaine sent her to the doctor with a bloody nose.

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Perhaps this feeling of being the wallflower at the orgy is part of the reason Ronstadt devotes only several pages, with a vague sense of embarrassment, to the years in which she was hands down the world’s biggest female rock star. The music’s rebellious spirit, she maintains, “wasn’t how I was brought up, and I didn’t wear the attitude well.” (Her framing of the book as “a musical memoir” is also presumably the reason she doesn’t mention her recent diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease.) The opening chapter of “Simple Dreams,” though, is moving and inspiring, an account of the diverse sounds that filled Ronstadt’s childhood home in Tucson and would go on to echo through her work on Broadway, her performances of American standards and Mexican folk songs, and her collaborations with singers from Dolly Parton to Aaron Neville. “The music I heard . . . before I was 10,” she writes, “provided me with material to explore for my entire career.”

“I am like a human lava lamp,” writes CeeLo Green in his affable autobiography, “Everybody’s Brother.” Moments like that are the highlights of the book, when this rotund singer/rapper demonstrates his unique, off-kilter sensibility — even if it’s not entirely clear what he’s talking about. Quoting Donald Trump or Sammy Davis Jr., reminiscing about the beloved Kiss and Bee Gees lunchboxes of his youth, CeeLo lays out the unlikely story of an Atlanta street thug who becomes a star with such left-field hits as Gnarls Barkley’s magnificent “Crazy” and the irresistible kiss-off given the radio-friendly title “Forget You,” as well as a sartorially resplendent coach on NBC’s singing competition “The Voice.”

Big Gipp, CeeLo’s friend and associate in the hip-hop group Goodie Mob, is enlisted as a kind of running reality check, though his commentaries feel more like padding than anything essential. The author’s frequent reminders of how unexpected his success has been, and exhortations to let our freak flags fly, are certainly admirable, if ultimately repetitive. Though a recent arrest proves his troubles aren’t all behind him, CeeLo’s journey is still one that’s sometimes genuinely hard to imagine. “I remember when people ran to avoid me,” he writes, “and now they run to shake my hand or get my autograph.”

Alan Light is the author of “The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley and the Unlikely Ascent of ‘Hallelujah.’ ”